LeadFootSpiderMonkey:THANK YOU to the TFer who is remaining anonymous, they are about to head out, and will be there in less than 10 minutes, you guys rock!!! Thanks for helping keep my family safe while we are so far away!

/would have re-upped myself, but literally have like 75 cents to my name, thanks for the kindness fark, they are heading to a safe place now due to someone gifting me TF and someone in TFD saw it, and told them to come immediately. siiiiiiiiiiigh of relief.

LeadFootSpiderMonkey:THANK YOU to the TFer who is remaining anonymous, they are about to head out, and will be there in less than 10 minutes, you guys rock!!! Thanks for helping keep my family safe while we are so far away!

/would have re-upped myself, but literally have like 75 cents to my name, thanks for the kindness fark, they are heading to a safe place now due to someone gifting me TF and someone in TFD saw it, and told them to come immediately. siiiiiiiiiiigh of relief.

Ugh. The 4th, 5th and 6th graders did NOT weather the storm in the school. They moved to the church before the tornado to the church which didn't get hit. The other ~75 people were in a cinder-block hallway that's...gone.

Di Atribe:netizencain: It doesn't take an expert to build a farking tornado shelter in a public building. So yes, explain to me the logic of electing to not do the right thing. Go ahead... you're the expert.

That's not what you asked. You asked why people get into a hallway, but I guess what you're really asking is why aren't safe rooms built into public buildings.

Try convincing a bunch of GOP faithful that they should cough up extra tax dollars to build a safe room in all public buildings for a once or twice in a lifetime event. Sure, at this point, it might be easy, but let's talk about it in a few months when the devastation isn't so fresh. For the types of tornadoes that USUALLY form (F2, F3), an interior room can keep you safe (including hallways). No outer walls, no windows. An interior room with plumbing is even better.

I'm no expert. But I've lived in Tornado Alley my entire life & I've got a degree in EM. I don't think I'm the final say, but I probably have studied situations like this more than you have.

You're right, my point is that a hallway shouldn't have been the sole, designated shelter in a public building.

And that school district just approved (in February) a $127 million dollar bond measure... so the voters are willing to spend... but the money wasn't ear-marked for tornado safety. So, I'm not sure where 'GOP' comes into play.

Perhaps - though - the hallway was especially designed... I don't know.

Fubini:netizencain: How the fark is a 'hallway' a safe zone in a school in tornado alley? Who the fark approves that?

You think we have the money to build tornado shelters in every school? You're confusing *safest* with *safe*.

It's also true that this is just a massive tornado. Most steel and cinderblock buildings don't have structural problems with small tornados, these kids just got really unlucky today. Do you want to guard yourself against 10-year storms? How about 100-year or 1000-year storms? What about 1000-year earthquakes? You only have so much money to build schools, and you can't make them invincible.

LeadFootSpiderMonkey:/would have re-upped myself, but literally have like 75 cents to my name, thanks for the kindness fark, they are heading to a safe place now due to someone gifting me TF and someone in TFD saw it, and told them to come immediately. siiiiiiiiiiigh of relief.

Fallout Zone:Joplin wasn't upgraded to an EF5 until at least the day after. No way they are going to say preliminary 5 and take it away.

The other factor is that they will rate the tornado along its entire length, and give it different ratings on different parts of its path if the levels of damage warrant it. I'm almost positive a lot of this will get upgraded to a 5 but some areas especially at the very beginning and end will get something lower so a 4 is a good preliminary average.

God-is-a-Taco:Marine1:They're possible, you just have to be willing to build one. We carved a damn fortress into Cheyenne Mountain, for fark's sake.

They should be built into the price of a home. This thing where people get killed and they find the corpse 1/2 a mile away from the home because they didn't have anywhere to go is getting really old. Especially when it's a kid.

Why would a business offer a service like that at a price people here could afford, much less for free? They're there to make money, not care about people.

It's not that much more, really. Especially when you consider the cost of housing in the Midwest and Great Plains.

Let's say you don't put a basement in EVERY home. If these towns can dig trenches for sewers, storm drains, and water mains, they can dig a 20'x20' (hell, smaller than that) every block or two as a tornado shelter.

It's a practice that we know would save lives. There's no real reason NOT to do it.

My mom lived through the 1999 tornado (her house wasn't so lucky), and this one looks a lot like that. This tornado was not as big or powerful as the 1999 one, but it looks like it took a path through heavier population density, so I would be surprised to see fatality totals 2x-5x as high as 1999.

wakitu:LeadFootSpiderMonkey: THANK YOU to the TFer who is remaining anonymous, they are about to head out, and will be there in less than 10 minutes, you guys rock!!! Thanks for helping keep my family safe while we are so far away!

/would have re-upped myself, but literally have like 75 cents to my name, thanks for the kindness fark, they are heading to a safe place now due to someone gifting me TF and someone in TFD saw it, and told them to come immediately. siiiiiiiiiiigh of relief.

Hurray Farkers!

For real man! it took like 5 minutes for everything to be worked out from the Boobies i made and for my uncle and his family to load the car and leave. Farkers. YOU. ARE . AWESOME.

wakitu: LeadFootSpiderMonkey: THANK YOU to the TFer who is remaining anonymous, they are about to head out, and will be there in less than 10 minutes, you guys rock!!! Thanks for helping keep my family safe while we are so far away!

/would have re-upped myself, but literally have like 75 cents to my name, thanks for the kindness fark, they are heading to a safe place now due to someone gifting me TF and someone in TFD saw it, and told them to come immediately. siiiiiiiiiiigh of relief.

Hurray Farkers!

For real man! it took like 5 minutes for everything to be worked out from the Boobies i made and for my uncle and his family to load the car and leave. Farkers. YOU. ARE . AWESOME.

wakitu: LeadFootSpiderMonkey: THANK YOU to the TFer who is remaining anonymous, they are about to head out, and will be there in less than 10 minutes, you guys rock!!! Thanks for helping keep my family safe while we are so far away!

/would have re-upped myself, but literally have like 75 cents to my name, thanks for the kindness fark, they are heading to a safe place now due to someone gifting me TF and someone in TFD saw it, and told them to come immediately. siiiiiiiiiiigh of relief.

Hurray Farkers!

For real man! it took like 5 minutes for everything to be worked out from the Boobies i made and for my uncle and his family to load the car and leave. Farkers. YOU. ARE . AWESOME.

netizencain:You're right, my point is that a hallway shouldn't have been the sole, designated shelter in a public building.

People generally don't think about emergency management until after the fact. It's not at the forefront of their minds. Even cities who get emergency management funds like federal grants tend to spend their dough on other things. FEMA used to have a program dedicated to disaster mitigation. W cut the program in 2003.

netizencain:And that school district just approved (in February) a $127 million dollar bond measure... so the voters are willing to spend... but the money wasn't ear-marked for tornado safety. So, I'm not sure where 'GOP' comes into play.

The "bond" gets repaid. It's not really a tax hike. GOP faithful generally hate taxes. They don't care what they're for. I see you're from San Francisco. Not sure if you've always lived there or what, but if you have, I'm guessing you've never really had to deal personally with Tea Partiers. Lucky you.

On this feed http://kfor.com/on-air/live-streaming/ they're showing the Moore / Norman hospital. Looks like it acted like a giant funnel catching cars -- they're all piled up into a mountain five or six deep against the main entrance. Looks like the tsunami from Japan more than any tornado damage I've ever seen.